Ursula Pawel, a petite, soft-spoken grandmother, lived on Woodland Road in Maplewood for more than 30
years. She and her late husband Hans raised two remarkable sons, David, now
a research statistician at the Environmental Protection Agency,
and Bruce, a pediatric pathologist at Children's Hospital in
Philadelphia. Before his untimely death in 1999 from colon cancer, Hans was a
professor of engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology. And
before her retirement, Ursula rode the train daily to Short Hills to work as an
X-ray technician.

The Pawel family led a normal, happy life in
Maplewood. Ursula never spoke about her youth as a German Jew during Hitler's
regime. Her neighbors and business associates knew nothing about
her experiences at Auschwitz and Theresienstadt, or the murders of
her father, brother, and countless friends and relatives in Hitler's death
camps. Even her sons knew little about these horrors.

Ursula and her mother, Caroline Lenneberg, arrived
in America in 1947. On their journey across the Atlantic, Pawel's
mother told her daughter, "We have a choice. We can live in the past or we can
start a new life. I vote for a new life."
This is the pledge that enabled them to begin again and to prosper in
their new country.

Although she has managed to transcend her past and now
exhibits an enviable sense of inner peace,

Pawel is no longer silent about her
experiences. In November of last year, she published

My Child Is Back!, a memoir of her first 22
years. Encouraged by her sons to share her story
and outraged by historical revisionists who try to deny the Holocaust, she felt a moral
obligation to be a witness to the unthinkable yet real
horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. She also speaks to community and school groups about her
"interrupted" life.

Pawel was born in 1926 to a
Jewish father and a Christian mother _ a mixed marriage that she says was fairly common in
those days. While Pawel and her younger brother Walter were raised as Jews, neither parent
exerted strong religious influence and Pawel felt equally at home among her Jewish and
Christian relatives. Her father, Otto Lenneberg,
ran a department store in the small town of Aplerbeck, near Dortmund in
northwestern Germany. Pawel remembers living in a
large apartment, complete with beautiful furniture and oriental carpets, and with a huge supply
of books in her father's study. She began school
in 1932 and enjoyed the company of many playmates, in addition to her large extended
family of aunts, uncles, and grandparents.

Ursula's first day of school, 1932.

Hitler became Chancellor of
Germany on January 30, 1933. Almost immediately,
restrictions began to be placed on Jews _ where they could go, where they could work,
what schools they could attend. At seven years
old, Pawel's first inkling that something was
wrong came when her playmates began to tell her,
"I cannot play with you anymore because you
are Jewish."

As more and more restrictions
and edicts were forced upon Jewish citizens, the Lenneberg family had to sell their business.
They moved to Dusseldorf in 1936 where Ursula and Walter could still be educated in a Jewish
school. Otto Lenneberg started another business, only to be thwarted by ever more systematic forms of repression.
Eventually, the family had to sell their possessions and survive only on the
meager work that Pawel's mother could get in a leather factory.

All along, the Lennebergs didn't believe that things could
continue to get worse. Pawel writes: "In 1933 my parents and many of
their Jewish friends had been convinced that Hitler would not be in
power for very long; they argued that the German people would not allow
it! I think that up until November 1938 they were still hoping for
a miracle. Then came the so-called `Kristallnacht' when countless
Germans watched and many applauded as Jewish homes were openly
plundered and destroyed. Jewish shopfronts were smashed and
our school and synagogue were burned to the ground. It became
quite clear what the Nazis were capable of, and now everybody was desperate
to leave Germany."

Ursula with her grandmother Oma Lenneberg in 1931.

The Lennebergs were
offered an affidavit, a promise that they would be provided for, by
distant relatives in Chicago. However, the American consul in Dusseldorf
arbitrarily decided that these relatives, even though they were quite wealthy, had given so many affidavits that the Lennebergs would have to secure additional sponsors. They had nowhere else to turn. When the war began in 1939, all travel stopped
and it was too late to get out.

A decree in 1941 ordered Jews to appear at police stations
to receive their "identification," a
black Star of David on a yellow background with the word "Jew"
(Jude in German) written across it. These had to be sewn onto all outer
garments and "prominently displayed whenever entering the German
world outside the home." Jews were now an openly marked people.

Despite daily threats and
inhumane treatment (Pawel's mother was ordered to "divorce the
Jew," which she refused to do),
Pawel's family managed to survive intact until 1942 when Ursula, at age
16, was summoned to join a transport to a labor camp. Knowing that
eventually they would all be called, Pawel's parents and brother
volunteered to accompany her. The Gestapo did not allow Pawel's
mother to go.

The transport took
Pawel and her father and brother to Theresienstadt (Terezin), near
Prague in what is now the Czech Republic.

Pawel explains: "Theresienstadt
had been a garrison town where soldiers were housed; the Nazis turned it
into a transit station in 1941. Jews from all over Europe were held there,
before being sent on to a camp where they would be selected for work
or extermination."

The Lennebergs spent
two years in Theresienstadt where Pawel cared for children in the youth
shelter and her father worked as a carpenter. In 1944, they again chose
to stay together when Pawel's father was ordered into another transport,
this time to Auschwitz, where he and Pawel's 14-year-old brother
were killed.

From this point on in her story, Pawel describes every day
as being like a lottery. "You had no idea each day whether you would live
or die there was no reason to anything, it's impossible to say why one
was chosen to live and another to die." Eventually, Pawel was transported
to an airplane factory but was rejected for work because of her
nearsightedness. Five other women _ three Czechs, a Dutch, and another
German _ were also rejected for work and joined Pawel on the trip back
to Auschwitz for their certain death.

A reunion in 1975; Ursula, Buschi, Hannah, and Zenda.

Hundreds of people were crammed into cattle cars for
the trip. Inexplicably, the six women were able to stay together in
their own car, accompanied by two young German soldiers.
The women, all German-speaking, spoke of their plans to commit
suicide by jumping on to the high-tension wires rather than be
gassed. When the train stopped, the soldiers led the six women through
the village of Merzdorf in what is now Poland. They delivered them to
the commander of a large work camp. Despite the commander's
insistence that she didn't want them, the soldiers clicked their heels, saluted,
and quickly left, thereby saving the lives of the six friends.

Pawel worked in that factory _ which made cloth from
flax _ until the war's end when Russian soldiers advanced and liberated
the camp. She and her Dutch friend Hilde Buschhoff, called
Buschi, then made a remarkable bicycle journey of nearly 500 miles
across Germany to the village of Lippborg, where the
Lenneberg family had agreed to meet if they were separated. Pawel did find
her mother, who could not stop crying, "My child is back, my child is back"
(Mein Kind ist zuruck), hence the book's title.

Pawel describes these events in
riveting detail but in a matter-of-fact style that
disguises the tremendous courage and tenacity she displayed in order to survive. It is a
personal account that brings the truth of
horrendously painful events to life for all to see and
learn from.

The book ends with Pawel's
marriage to Hans on September 24, 1948 in Boston. Though she'd only known him for six
weeks, they enjoyed 51 years of marriage. "He was
a good choice, a wonderful man," she says.
Also a German Jew, Hans Pawel survived the war by escaping to England as a student in
1939. His entire family was killed, including his
father, a surgeon who had received a medal of honor for his skill at saving German
soldiers in the trenches of World War I.

Pawel now lives in a lovely
condominium in Bedminster where she moved when she could no longer take care of her house and her ailing husband. Her heart, she says, will always be in Maplewood, that "unique melting pot where people from every ethnic background find a welcome."

Holocaust survivor and Nobel
Prize winning author Elie Wiesel wrote:
"Remembering is an act of generosity, aimed at
saving men and women from apathy to evil, if not from evil itself." With her poignant
book and her generous sharing, Ursula Pawel adds her
strong voice toward ending such evil. She concludes: "I hope
that people will not see this only as a Holocaust story, but as
a book to teach tolerance and stop hate."

My Child Is Back! is
published by Vallentine Mitchell (London, England) and is
available by calling 1-800-944-6190, visiting any
independent or onlinebookseller, or
contacting Pawel directly at
upawel@gateway.net.

Valerie Davia moved to Maplewood in 1998. She is
grateful that her work with Matters
Magazine introduces her to inspiring people like Ursula Pawel.